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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mhacdebhandia" data-source="post: 4502666" data-attributes="member: 18832">So? It's still a perfect example of reader interpretation arising from what they see in the text, not necessarily what the author intended to write - doubly so, since there's a deliberate ambiguity which makes it even easier to support mutually-contradictory readings.The point is that no-one is "most qualified" to tell you what a work is about. An author can tell you what she intended to put into a work, but what a reader sees in the work is absolutely just as much "there". The text exists; when you read it, you create your own interpretation of it.Humour is actually a good example - how often have you laughed at a joke because it reminded you of a situation or a person from your own life? The fact that the person who wrote the joke may (or may not) have written it because of a similar situation or person in their life is interesting, but it's not why you laugh. You laugh because it reminds you of something in your memories.It's the same with absolutely everything; it's just not always as obvious. To use an oft-discussed example from fantasy literature, I believe J. R. R. Tolkien when he says that he didn't intend any kind of allegory or comparison to Hitler in The Lord of the Rings, but I think it's also ludicrous to say that you can't get something meaningful out of the text when you, as a reader, make that comparison yourself - and we're talking about something the authorial Word of God outright denied was intended.It's still there, dude.</blockquote>

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